The Future of America's National Monuments

·58 min·5 clips

Historian Clay Jenkinson previews a September event on the Antiquities Act with archaeologist Dr. Susan Ryan and Navajo co-chair Davina Smith.

The crisis begins with land. The host opens with a September gathering at Crow Canyon in Cortez, Colorado, where national monuments, the Antiquities Act, and the Four Corners landscape will be studied through field trips and discussion. Dr. Susan Ryan gives the conversation its archaeological footing. She is introduced as a friend and a serious scholar connected to Crow Canyon and to an event that includes Davina Smith of the Bears Ears Intertribal Coalition. The episode does not treat this as abstract policy. It is about places, extraction, presidential authority, and the question of what deserves protection. Ryan takes the story back before the present fight. Representative Lacy of Iowa and an archaeologist named Hewitt enter after a 1902 trip through the Four Corners area and Petrified Forest helped turn fieldwork into a congressional report. The Antiquities Act did not just appear. Between 1900 and 1906, Ryan says, at least fourteen iterations and eight major bills moved back and forth while different interests argued over how much the law should protect. Scientists and scholars wanted broad safeguards for archaeological resources. Congress wanted something narrower and more local, especially after earlier forest reserve authority let presidents pull land away from timber extraction. The host ties that mistrust to claims of overreach and to TR setting aside 150 million acres of national forest. Ryan keeps the story from getting too tidy. The act was discussed as a smaller withdrawal from public lands, but proposed acreage caps disappeared from the final bill. What remained was the requirement that monuments be limited to the smallest area compatible with proper care and management. That tension still sits under the debate. The event details keep coming back, but they are not filler. The field trips and long conversations around Cortez become part of the point: to slow down and look carefully at where these protections came from, and where they may go next.

As heard by us

A historical conversation about national monuments becomes a present-tense debate over authority, public land, and sovereignty.

The episode frames the National Monuments and Antiquities Act as an argument that never fully settled: who gets to protect public land, and whose histories and sovereignties are recognized in that protection. Dr.

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Why you'd press play

Press play when the Antiquities Act starts sounding less like settled history and more like a live argument over who gets to decide what America protects.

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